1) The paper "'Don't believe the media's pandemic propaganda!!!' How Covid-19 affected populist Facebook user comments in seven European countries." was awarded the Best Paper Award at the International Communication Association (ICA) Regional Conference 2022: Computational Communication Research in Central and Eastern Europe in Helsinki, Finland, June 27-29, 2022.
The Best Paper Award at the ICA Regional Conference on Computational Communication Research honors the most outstanding contribution to the conference from a young scholar. The best paper was selected by a committee of five distinguished researchers. The prize winner receives a fee waiver for the next Annual ICA Conference in Toronto. In his paper, Daniel Thiele analyzed the impact of various aspects of the Covid-19 crisis on populist user-commenting behavior on Facebook. Applying methods of automated content analysis on a multilingual dataset of 3.5M user-comments from seven European countries, Daniel Thiele demonstrated how the stringency of containment measures fueled populist commenting. Providing a perspective for counter-strategies, the paper showed that populist commenting can be mitigated by moderation of the comments section through mass media pages.
2) From the European Journal of Communication Daniel received the "Young ECREANS travel grant" for the planned presentation of the paper "Poisoning Online Debates? How Populist Facebook Comments Affect Online Deliberation in Austria and Slovenia'" (together with Tjaša Turnšek at ECC in Aarhus, 19-22 October 2022)
The European Journal of Communication (EJC)-funded grant supports the attendance of an excellent PhD candidate at the 9th European Communication Conference in Aarhus, 19-22 October 2022. From 12 competing submissions, the reviewing committee (Peter Golding, Christina Holtz-Bacha, Félix Ortega, Irena Reifová) selected the paper that will be presented by Daniel Thiele to score highest regarding originality, methodological rigour, and significance to the field of media and communication studies. EJC invites the grant holder to develop the paper proposal into a full paper, which will be considered for publication in the European Journal of Communication.
Congratulations to Daniel!
Daniel Thiele's Homepage & Contact information
